Was this never a thing in the US previously?

I distinctly remember from my school days (Western EU) mobile phones were to remain off and in backpacks.

And those were still the days we you just had this relatively dumb flipphone that could litterally only call and text and if you were lucky had a potato camera as it's main novelty.

There was no access to internet, much less AI's that can do your entire homework for you and they were already annoying to deal with for a teacher. Can't imagine how that is now.

I teach middle school in a state with a cell phone ban. We had our first year with the phone ban last year, and I thought it was an improvement.

Phones can be very detrimental to the school experience. For one, it is very difficult to teach kids who are already unwilling or resistant to learning while they have a piece of technology they are literally addicted to in their hand. Secondly, phones and social media contribute to a lot to the bullying, violence, and general misbehavior that occurs at schools.

My school district also provides all students with an iPad, so they have their own school-provided tech. In my experience, this comes with their own problems though. I often feel like I am playing "whack-a-mole" keeping kids off their iPads (playing games, etc.) during instruction. It's nice to be able to incorporate technology into lessons, and it definitely is more convenient for teaching, but I don't think the trade off is worth it. For example, the cheating with A.I. was off the charts for me last year.

This coming school year, I am looking to incorporate more paper and pencil assignments into my teaching. A lot of my students seem to favor assignments where they aren't using their iPads. I think most agree that these kids' eyeballs need a break from the screens.

Also, to people with concerns about the phone ban, students are allowed to bring their phone to school. My state's law states that the phone must be turned off and in the student's backpack during instructional hours. Students may be on their phone at school before and after classes start. In the event of an emergency, no one is going to care if the students get their phone out their bag to call their adult. So, kids will retain access to their phone. In fact, most of the students carry their phones around in the pocket and none of the teachers generally care as long as the student isn't blatantly using their phone during class time. If a kid is caught using their phone during class time, they have to turn it in to the main office for the remainder of the day will escalating consequences for repeat offenses.

Also, I'm sure it varies from teacher to teacher, but I am very understanding when a kid needs to contact a parent/guardian. I will always allow my students to use the phone in my classroom, call a parent from the main office, or use their cell phone in the hall as long as the kid asks permission and explains the situation.

Y'all need to go read /r/teachers to learn what a scourge phones in classrooms are. The teachers are begging for an outright ban.

My disagreements with the policy are twofold, but I was a weird kid. And I am a weird adult.

Firstly, when my social studies teacher or my American history teacher tries to pass state propaganda as fact, I want to have the internet available to find sources either that confirm what I'm being taught or refut it. And similarly when our chemistry class can only provide a poor, hazy image of what we're doing, I want to be able to go online and get a better one.

We didn't have the internet when I was in school in the eighties, and instead, we had shitty textbooks and a state mandated syllabus. It was evident, even then, that we were being indoctrinated with an agenda, and being denied informed consent.

And as a naïve kid, I believed my schooling and grew up Republican... Eventually, I'd learn how much bullshit was spoon fed to me, and that our school districts, in fact, do not have an agenda to equip students for adult life, rather are instruments of control.

And secondly, the internet provides lifelines online for kids at risk, such as neurodivergents, LGBT+, kids in dysfunctional homes. And they should have access to them. I didn't have those resources, and I believe my outcome is worse for it.

I get it, regarding bullying. Social media harassment is a problem, but by comparison I was cornered and outnumbered three to one by kids twice my size. Kids do not require social media to hurt. Since it was their word against mine school administrators sided with my assailants. Every time. I'd work out later they just hate weakling kids, and believe I should be able to hold my own against such odds.

I can assure you kids will be bullied anyway, just as sex trafficking increased when SESTA / FOSTA cut off internet resources to sex traffickers (and killed personal ads and ended online sex worker support groups.)

But then, I'm neurodivergent and was in that gap in which I was quite bright and interested in learning, but had testing difficulties so I wasn't eligible for gifted programs. The mainstream school district wasn't intended for me. But then there wasn't a place for me at all.

The US state education districts are not being run in good faith, prioritizing obedience over critical thinking skills, ideological doctrine over factual history and enrichment of companies and administrators over paying faculty and budgeting learning materials. Restricting students from their own resources is yet another admission that the US does care what happens to students, and reinforces the notion that schools are not institutions of learning, but detainment centers to lock kids up and keep them out of mischief until they are legally responsible for their actions.

But as I said. I was a weird kid. And my schools assured I would never live it down.

I think this is a tough one to weigh in on depending where you come from. If I lived somewhere where the news talked about school shootings a lot, I might want my child to have a phone.

Go after the companies making addictive applications instead.

I live and teach in a state that implemented a ban. Results after year one were marginal improvement. Many just did the "hiding" trick more than before. A number didn't think we'd notice them hunched over whispering to their watches. It was rather comical when they would do that.

Can we just ban them in general? We used to be a proper society and had our phones on the kitchen walls with 25ft cords.

Imagine a world where teachers weren't geriatric and taught their kids digital literacy instead of digital luddism.

I mean, shit, homework was invented as a fucking punishment and so many studies have shown it has diminishing returns after a certain age. Yet here we are, perpetuating a system designed explicitly for controlling kids - not teaching them.

But yeah, phones are the problem. The internet is the problem. Definitely not how kids are taught to interact with them, no sir. While we're at it, just get rid of PCs at the school - that way the district can save money on their IT department. They can access social media from the PCs so I don't see the problem.

Bring back dumb phones

My position on this is really weird because I'm in support of laptops being in classrooms for educational uses. However, I'm against cell phones being in classroom.

That being said, as someone who grew up in a school system that didn't allow the parent to communicate with their child or a teenager, meaning that they couldn't call the school to have them relay a message, I am firmly against a straight ban period on school grounds. I was given a phone because my parents' work schedule was very fluid and could change within an hour or two. And on more than a handful of occasions, my mom would call the school and be like, hey, you need to relay the message to get on a different bus because there's no one going to be home, And they just wouldn't relay it. It also helped if I chose to go to a friends house after school

I'm also disliking how they skewed the results. If you read the actual study, you'll see that they merged the kind of agree strongly agree and the kind of disagree strongly disagree categories to make it a binary choice, but then chose to omit the six percent of the people who said they didn't care or had no strong opinion.

they also removed any results where the person chose the first option or the last option on every question. And I dislike any type of automated data sanitation method like that, because while they did randomize the first and fourth answer, every time, there's always the possibility that someone legitimately answered everything as either the first or last answer. My own vote could be stated that since I strongly agree that the cell phone shouldn't be in the classroom, but strongly disagree that it should be straight banned. So if question one and question two had the polarity of question one and question 2 flipped, where one was strongly agree and one was strongly disagree, it's entirely possible I would have been removed from the survey as a fraudulent result.

edit: removed couple sentences that drifted from topic some and fixed a repeated line

Had a friend in the most expensive private school in my area. They had phones banned over a decade ago already.

Probably because richer parents have more mental bandwidth to worry about children's digital footprint and neural development rather than survival.

Thus I believe extending this ban to public schools is only fair. Distraction-free and surveillance-free environment for children shouldn't be a luxury reserved for few.

I mean, are phones conducive to learning? If not then forbid their usage at school and bloody enforce it. I think the fact phones became common place for kids so quickly and so early in their lives coupled with just the general insanity of American schools so often being under attack, the schools have just lost any agency to restrict them given their usage is already rampant.

as a parent, I would say what matters is geo-location and text to coordinate pick-up or plans. there is no need for younger kids to have a full fledged phone if one could be developed that serves those functions. I'm thinking 90s flip phones with GPS. It really sounds like a gold mine for some company to supply these limited devices given the market for them.